Johnny Mnemonic

This short story was incredibly confusing to follow. Honestly, I don't think that many people who haven't lived in Japan would understand a lot of it. Ono-Sendai make much sense in terms of the Japanese language, yet in Gibson's story, it's a super-computer type piece of machinery that has some regulation purposes. Yakuza is the Japanese mafia, which, I don't believe was mentioned anywhere in the story. Also, Chiba city is really a city, and it's north/west of Tokyo itself. A minor side-note: I went to Chiba city when I was filmed as an extra in the Grudge 2.

For me, this story had a lot of interesting cultural things (Japanese) that I could relate to, and that made me very excited to read it. On the other hand, the complexity of the story in such a short number of pages, was utterly discouraging. It was difficult to follow what was going on without highlighting, or writing down notes.

Another part I did like, was the concept of having a human being serve as a place for digital storage, as well as a messenger. Having this man travel all around with different bits of information in his head-different secret messages in encrypted languages that only the receiving end could understand-was fascinating to ponder. I imagine that eventually, all humans will have some sort of micro-data chip in them by which to store information, documents, etc. When the nanotechnology for implants this small will come around, however, I do not know.